


Don't Apologize

by godspeed77



Category: Be More Chill - Iconis/Tracz
Genre: How Do I Tag, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Jeremy is a Smol Bean and I will fight you on this, M/M, Pre-Squip, also Michael's moms are in this for like 2 seconds at the end, literally just another "Jeremy's mom leaves and Michael is a Good Bro" fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-07
Updated: 2019-05-07
Packaged: 2020-02-27 15:12:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 915
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18741592
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/godspeed77/pseuds/godspeed77
Summary: Jeremy climbs into Michael's room at 1 am.------------------------------------rated teen for a few swears and minor child abuse





	Don't Apologize

**Author's Note:**

> Because there aren't enough of these flics out there already.
> 
> I got inspired to write this at 12:22 am and I originally wrote it in Comic Sans because sometimes what we hate most gives us inspiration.
> 
> My life is a disaster.
> 
> Also I edited for like five minutes at 1:30 am the day after I wrote it so yea here's what my sleep-deprived brain came up with.

Michael had gotten up from his 1:00 am vine binge-watching session to grab some food from the pantry. When he left his room, he'd been the only one there, but during his voyage to his stash of midnight snacks, one Jeremy Heere had appeared. 

Jeremy was clearly going through some shit. The first giveaway was that he'd spontaneously climbed through Michael’s partially open window at 1:37 am. This was confirmed the moment Michael surpassed the surprise of seeing his best friend on the floor of his room enough to see the state of said best friend on the floor. Jeremy's face was stained by tear tracks that hadn't quite stopped yet, he was breathing hard, and he had a bloody cut on his cheek. 

“Hey, hey, hey, what's going on?” Michael asked, crossing the room to sit in front of Jeremy. His brain had switched automatically into Protective Best Friend Mode.

“My m-mom, she…” Jeremy didn't finish his sentence, but Michael could guess what had happened. 

“Do you wanna tell me what happened?”

“Her and Dad, they were fighting again and… it was worse than usual, and I came downstairs, and she saw me, and she…” Jeremy trailed off, a fresh wave of tears cascading down and mixing with the blood on his cheek.

“Did she, y’know…” Michael gestured to the cut. 

“Y-yeah, and then she just… left, and my dad went into the basement, and I haven't seen him since.”

If Michael ever saw Jeremy’s mom again, he was going to kill her with his bare hands. Hell, if Jeremy wasn't crying on his floor, he would've tracked her down then and there. As it was, he filed away the murder plans and pulled the smaller boy into his chest. Something inside Jeremy seemed to break at this action, and he started full-on sobbing against Michael. Michael ran his hand through Jeremy’s hair and silently cursed the universe for hurting his friend like this.

After a few minutes, Jeremy had calmed down to the point where his face was just streaked by a tear every once in a while.  
“Come on, let's get you cleaned up,” Michael said, scooping Jeremy into his arms and carrying him bridal-fashion into the bathroom down the hall. He sat Jeremy down on the edge of the bathtub and ran a washcloth under the faucet. Wringing it out, Michael began to rub away the blood and tears on Jeremy’s face. Once the blood had been cleaned away from the cut, Michael pulled out the first aid kit that was stored under the sink and took a bottle of Neosporin and a pack of butterfly bandages. He covered the cut with Neosporin and began to close the wound. It didn't look too bad, just a shallow cut, but it still ripped Michael’s soul into pieces to think that Jeremy’s own mother had made it. 

“Sorry for barging in and having a breakdown in the middle of the night,” Jeremy said, just barely above a whisper.

“Don't apologize. You have nothing to be sorry about. None of this is your fault,” Michael responded, sticking the last bandage on the cut. “Let’s go to the kitchen so I can make hot chocolate.”

Hot chocolate was the official, go-to drink whenever one of them ended up at the other’s house having an emotional crisis. Neither one of them ever drank it outside of these anymore, but the habit never changed. Michael couldn't count the how many times he'd sat behind Jeremy’s counter with a mug after a panic attack, or Jeremy had done the same behind Michael’s counter. It was the comforting constant that they could always rely on. 

Michael pushed away his thoughts and returned the supplies he'd used to the kit. Jeremy wordlessly stood up and followed Michael back down the hall towards the staircase. Michael ran into his room and picked up a few blankets and his laptop. He draped a green fleece throw around Jeremy’s shoulders and headed towards the kitchen. After setting his cargo down on the living room couch, he removed two packets of hot chocolate mix, a bag of marshmallows, and a couple packs of candy from a corner of the pantry that he'd taken over for these occasions. Michael poured the mix into a pair of mugs with some milk and put them in the microwave. When the timer had counted down to 00:01, he opened the door with the expertise that one gets after several years of midnight snacks. Handing one of the mugs to Jeremy, Michael walked back into the living room with Jeremy trailing behind. He opened his laptop, entered the password (readyP1), and pulled up Netflix. 

“So, what are we watching?” Michael asked, handing the laptop to Jeremy, who scrolled through Netflix for a while before deciding on Mulan. The unspoken rule of middle-of-the-night-mental-breakdown movies was that the chosen movie had to belong to one of three categories: Disney/Pixar, Marvel, or some ridiculously stupid and cheesy teen movie. 

By the time Mulan had buried the Huns in the avalanche, Jeremy had fallen asleep with his head on Michael’s shoulder. Not long after that, Michael dropped off as well.

 

If Michael’s moms came downstairs the next morning after a slightly panicked phone call from Jeremy’s dad and snapped a picture of the two boys, burrowed under five blankets with several bags of M&M’s and Swedish Fish scattered around the area, to send to him, they'd never tell.

**Author's Note:**

> So I got out of bed to tie off my braid in the middle of the night and somewhere while I was doing that the idea for this popped into my head and I couldn't abandon it so I wrote this whole shebang from 12:26 am to 2:39 am and I'm so sleep-deprived that I wrote “oven” instead of “microwave” and didn't even notice it until I saw that I made a typo in the word “oven” and was like. wait that's not the kitchen appliance they need. so yea I also left really weird-ass notes for myself when I was editing such as “this is a weird transition send help editing me” and “add stuff in this paragraph. there's literally one sentence in it.”
> 
> also I wrote this while burritoing myself about 8 blankets so yea
> 
> follow me on tumblr i make about 0 original content but do it anyway @godspeed31-26


End file.
